BTW Ortega in Nicaragua just started killing students and dissidents lol, so add him to the list of murderous dictators from the left in latinamerica.
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traxamillion United States. Jul 21 2018 03:02. Posts 10468
On May 12 2018 22:57 MezmerizePLZ wrote:
Everyone loves to talk about how awful everything is, how the gap between rich and poor only grows, how you cannot support a family with no skills/education anymore. It's viewed as a conspiracy by the rich to keep the poor down. You're born into the world with nothing, and nothing is guaranteed. We talked about this in another thread, but with market forces, of course unskilled labor is worth shit when globalization opens the door for billions of workers in poorer countries like China/India, etc. Along with other trends of specialization becoming more and more important.
I don't fkin get why we are having a spending deficit in the U.S. during such a long expansion, but politicians always just kick the can down the road.
you can see why (((they))) love globalisation while walling off their own insulated enclave
"A new investigation published by The Intercept exposes how a libertarian think tank called the Atlas Network is remaking Latin American politics with the help of powerful conservative institutions and funders in the United States, some of whom you may recognize, such as the Koch brothers. The Intercept reports the Atlas Network is behind dozens of prominent groups that have supported right-wing forces in the anti-government movement in Venezuela, as well as those who ousted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We are joined by The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who covers the intersection of money and politics. His new piece is tilted, Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics."
(This is a couple years old but I wasn't aware of it)
On July 18 2018 23:48 Baalim wrote:
BTW Ortega in Nicaragua just started killing students and dissidents lol, so add him to the list of murderous dictators from the left in latinamerica.
It's true that he is a murderous dictator, but this tells us nothing about what led to this, what were the forces that led to this kind of violence and corruption. We have to pay attention to details here: these protests and the repression that came with it were the result of slashing pensions, outlawing abortion, Ortega being increasingly pro-business and having extremely low social spending -- clearly these are not positions that are associated with the left. Quite the contrary, they are positions associated with neoliberal Republicanism.
I think the situation in Nicaragua is the best one for me to sympathize with your hatred of leftism, because you are used to seeing these bankrupt parties, but it is also the best one for me to illustrate the mistake of generalizing and oversimplify the left axis as a single, homogeneous left. Like, this obviously has absolutely nothing to do with the leftist revolution in Rojava or Mexico. Pointing to this and saying "this is leftism, this is socialism, it always leads to this" is dumb, and taking the absolute opposite position, the position of reinforcing the imperialist, profit-over-people agenda, which has robbed these people of the possibility of living well in their countries in the first place, that is a tragic mistake. The corruption and the failures of these regimes only represent these regimes, they do not represent the entire left and what is possible, in fact from this we can see that he is only a "socialist" in name carried from the past -- neither his social or economic policies are socialist.
Authoritarianism (born out of and maintained through hierarchical structures of organization) and the pressures to conform to an homogeneous neoliberal America are the causal factors here, not 'leftism'. The underlying capitalist system was never done away with; they still had to operate within it, making bad alliances that lead to bad results, while trying to rebuild from the insane amount of damage that the US caused to their land and economy, while still under their threats and sanctions. A rational person should be completely disillusioned with these so-called socialist governments once they look at them, but they shouldn't fail to make the causal links to the capitalist/imperialist ideology that it sought to free itself from unsuccessfully and which not only breed these revolutionary efforts but corrupts them as well.
A short history of what happened post-war:
Ortega’s tendency within the Sandinistas, the terceristas, had always favoured an approach that married armed insurrection to cross-class alliances with business owners, the churches, professionals on one hand and shanty-town dwellers and the unemployed on the other. This strategy is echoed in other Latin American left nationalist movements.
In 2006 Ortega won the presidential elections, with a former Contra leader as his running mate. He firmed up his alliance with the Catholic Church and as a part of this deal introduced strict legislation against abortion where before in the 1980s he had supported abortion rights. He also formed an alliance with the Constitutional Liberal Party.
He began to build alliances with Iran, Cuba and then Venezuela. Recently he has increased his ties with China and Russia. He was again re-elected in 2011 and in 2016. He increased his support of business in this period. Using the assets from the confiscated land and property, Ortega and his wife Vice-President Rosario Murillo, together with other Sandinistas formed an alliance with big businessmen to build up a considerable business conglomerate, which includes control of various media outlets.
Meanwhile Nicaragua’s social spending per head is one of the lowest in the region. 62% of the population live in dire poverty, whilst there are around 250 multimillionaires who have prospered under Ortega.
This April 18th Ortega announced cuts in pensions and increases in social security contributions as dictated by the International Monetary Fund. This was a bridge too far for many. Barricades were erected in towns south of the capital Managua, and heavy fighting with police and army has resulted in many deaths. The unrest has continued now for three months and shows no signs of abating. The movement has increasingly called for the removal of Ortega and Murillo.
The USA for its part, whilst looking favourably on Ortega’s pro-business positions, is disturbed by the Nicaragua-Venezuela-Cuba axis, and the links with Russia, China and Iran. The revolt in Nicaragua must not be allowed to be hi-jacked by the US, who would install another reactionary regime more compliant with their policies.
The whole sorry scenario in Nicaragua, and indeed in Mexico and Venezuela, reveals the bankruptcy of leftist politics in Latin America. It is even more imperative that a pan-American revolutionary anarchist movement is developed, a movement based on the working class, peasantry and indigenous peoples, not tied to any of the power blocs, and that the road to social revolution is opened."
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
"I only came across the revelations about Friedman’s sordid beginnings in the footnotes of an old book on the history of lobbying by former Newsweek book editor Karl Schriftgiesser, published in 1951, shortly after the Buchanan Committee hearings ended. The actual details of Milton Friedman’s PR deal are sordid and familiar, with tentacles reaching into our ideologically rotted-out era.
It starts just after the end of World War Two, when America’s industrial and financial giants, fattened up from war profits, established a new lobbying front group called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) that focused on promoting a new pro-business ideology—which it called “libertarianism”— to supplement other business lobbying groups which focused on specific policies and legislation.
The FEE is generally regarded as “the first libertarian think-tank” as Reason’s Brian Doherty calls it in his book “Radicals For Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement” (2007). As the Buchanan Committee discovered, the Foundation for Economic Education was the best-funded conservative lobbying outfit ever known up to that time, sponsored by a Who’s Who of US industry in 1946.
A partial list of FEE’s original donors in its first four years includes: The Big Three auto makers GM, Chrysler and Ford; top oil majors including Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, and Sun Oil; major steel producers US Steel, National Steel, Republic Steel; major retailers including Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field and Sears; chemicals majors Monsanto and DuPont; and other Fortune 500 corporations including General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, BF Goodrich, ConEd, and more.
The FEE was set up by a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive named Leonard Read, together with Donaldson Brown, a director in the National Association of Manufacturers lobby group and board member at DuPont and General Motors.
That is how libertarianism started: As an arm of big business lobbying."
The only thing that is guaranteed is anguish and death. People are not born into this world with nothing. Look at Trump. He had a multimillionaire mentor and $100 milly trust fund upon his first breaths. So, we can't really do anything about death besides make things safer and healthier and prolong life a little bit. There are things we can do about anguish and suffering. Shouldn't we be focusing on that? No one chooses anguish and suffering. No one chooses to be a baby in Africa that has those bugs that eat their eyes so they die from that or they die from starvation or whatever fate becomes them. So, we rush to make cold profit and many people get sick. Some people can buy nice couches, country club memberships, and boats. Maybe a boat gets you some freedom out on the open seas like some sort of modern day pirate drinking luxury rum and singing pop songs but does it really anesthetize the looting and the pilfering in the form of more margin, charming sales pitches, more hours in the office, numbers in a spreadsheet, the expectation of being a perfect brand, man, whatever. There have got to be better markers of how we are doing as citizens of earth. Not fucking comparing GDP numbers. Nike and Apple should not be allowed to exploit and mistreat workers to such an extent that they are building deterrents because too many people are killing themselves.
gambling if you think its fun
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Stroggoz New Zealand. Jul 13 2020 22:59. Posts 5296
On May 12 2018 22:57 MezmerizePLZ wrote:
Everyone loves to talk about how awful everything is, how the gap between rich and poor only grows, how you cannot support a family with no skills/education anymore. It's viewed as a conspiracy by the rich to keep the poor down. You're born into the world with nothing, and nothing is guaranteed. We talked about this in another thread, but with market forces, of course unskilled labor is worth shit when globalization opens the door for billions of workers in poorer countries like China/India, etc. Along with other trends of specialization becoming more and more important.
I don't fkin get why we are having a spending deficit in the U.S. during such a long expansion, but politicians always just kick the can down the road.
Gini coefficient is not a great measure of inequality, especially for those not educated in economics. A small difference from .45 to .53 or w/e won't look like much to the ordinary person. Many economists have stopped using the gini measure and are using a lot of better ways to measure inequality.
there's something like 2-3 trillion being extracted from the global south every year in interest payments on loan sharking (imf, world bank), tax evasion, (transfer pricing and misinvoicing), and increasingly they are losing wealth from climate change, which is already 580$ billion a year according to one study.
One of 3 non decent human beings on a site of 5 people with between 2-3 decent human beings
